muslim feminist quran tafsir council!?

so i saw this article on y! news about muslim feminists in new york wanting to start a quran interpretation council - their goal being to break streotypes involving terrorism and women being oppressed in islam.

i don’t know why, but something strikes me as odd about this… “muslim feminists” might be the start of oddity - islam is the first religion that gave women rights and elevated women to a status that is many times higher than that of men. the examples are innumerable, but just one example is that one of the top narrators of ahadeeth who taught the great men of the ummah and whom many of the great scholars took their knowledge directly or indirectly was sayida 3a2isha (ra).

secondly, a “shura council of women to interpret the Quran?” – i mean what do they think this is, “everyone interpret the Quran the way they wish?” – its not about men and injustice as they claim it is - the great islamic universities are open to women just as they are for men - no one stopped any woman from studying islam at al Azhar or Madinah Unniversity and publishing great works on Islam if they want to…

so i don’t get it, how is a group of random women (which is what i think of when reading this article, of course i could be wrong…) simply going to decide that “men are unjust, we are going to make a council to interpret the Quran?”

i have no problem with women writing tafseer of Quran - as long as they are qualified to do so. however, a group of random women (or men for that matter) writing a tafseer? i think not…

does anyone else see this, or is it that perhaps i am reading too much into this article?

new boards and ps3 lines

i am/was kind of surprised to see a whole bunch of random people sitting in front of frys when i went there this morning. at first, because of their dress and appearance, i thought maybe they were homeless people or something sleeping in front of the store. later in the day when i saw the same scene at another store, i realized that these were the people sleeping in front of the store to get their hands on one of the first ps3s…

was pretty amazed to find out that most new intel boards only have 1 ide slot these days… i guess ide is a thing of the past now…

update - some interesting articles about this whole ps3 thing. and, the smashing of a ps3 in front of those who waited in line for so long just to get one…

WoW as a really bad paying job...

i was looking on ebay, where you can sell your WoW characters for an amount depending on the type of gear and money they have. so glancing at some of the previous auctions, rogues seem to go between $150 and $500, depending on how tweaked they are.

so guestimating rad to get ~$200 (i think that’s a safe guess based on his not-so-uber uberness), and estimating about 34 days of /played time on him, that’s 816 hours for about $200… which is less than a quarter per hour!!! in 1938, that was minimum wage (although that was equivalent of about $3.22 in 2005). but now, minimum wage is about $5.15, which means WoW pays less than 1/20th of the current US minimum wage.

now if we also take into account the $14.99/month fee for playing… then wow…

(source: wikipedia).

over 1k bookmarks

my del.icio.us account (and hence my myweb2 account) has reached over 1000 bookmarks… like whoa.

islamic advice from sheikh google

i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.

and no, i haven’t custom added any rss feeds to gmail… it means, “know Allah’s marvelous/magnificent plan for your life…” thanks google!

عيد مبارك

eid mubarak to all - may Allah accept our deeds during this month - ameen.

2005 census: us marriage rates down

[The findings] indicated that marriage did not figure in nearly 55.8 million American family households, or 50.2 percent.

this is really sad.

so small, part 2...

in light of the previous post, i saw an amazing 7 minute astronomy video on youtube (or should i say ‘gootube’?) talking about how tiny the earth really is.

these days, during ramadan, i’ve heard people quote a hadith several times that i hadn’t remembered hearing before that is really quite spectacular - the rough meaning based on what i remember is (i could have forgotten - i tried to find out which hadith book this came from but couldn’t find it, if someone can point me to where i’d really appreciate it), “the worldly heaven in comparison to the second heaven is like a ring in a desert, and the second heaven to the third is like a ring in a desert, and the third to the fourth is like a ring in a desert, and the fourth to the fifth is like a ring in a desert, and the fifth to the sixth is like a ring in a desert, and the sixth to the seventh is like a ring in a desert, and the seventh to the kursiy is like a ring in a desert, and the kursi to the 3arsh (or throne) of Allah (SWT) is like a ring in a desert.”

wsalams.

so small...

we are so small… reminds me of this verse (3:191)…

الذين يذكرون الله قياما وقعودا وعلى جنوبهم ويتفكرون في خلق السماوات والأرض ربنا ما خلقت هذا باطلا سبحانك

nice nasheed on youtube

one of my friends told me about this nice nasheed video (islamic song) on youtube - interestingly enough, i saw it being played on tv while i was flipping through the channels the following day… and i made a youtube account so i can use the favorites list and added it as my first favorite on there :) by the way, who sings this, does he mean mishari rashid?

edit - i was going to put a direct embedding of the video here, but seems as though i have to jump through some hoops to get wordpress to do this. so the video link is here.